Part 58 (1/2)

But she still took care of her business, the paper work and all, you know. Once, I saw Charles come into the store and she needed him to sign a few things, if you please, and he took them papers and bragged to the fellas in the store that ”See, I got to sign things around here to keep things goin.” He didn't even read them, just waved his hand and signed them and handed them to Mary without even looking at her, like she was a secretary or something, and went on out and drove off with a big grin looking 50 worth of importance, to me anyway.

Well, Mary just kep getting worse off. I told her to see a doctor and she said she had in the big city and she had something they couldn't cure but she wish I wouldn't tell n.o.body, so I didn't. But I felt so bad for her I loved her. I knew whatever was killing her was started by a heavy sad heart, shaking hands, a sore spirit, hot tears, deep, heavy sighs, hurtful swallows and oh, you know, all them kinda things.

Soon she had to stay home in bed. Wasn't no long sickness though, I could see she was going fast. Near the end, one day I saw her out in her back yard picking up rocks and I knew the dear soul must be losing her mind also and I took her back in the house and tried to get her to let loose the rocks and throw them away, but she wouldn't let go. She was sick but she was strong in her hands, from all that work, I guess, she just held on to them, so I said, ”s.h.i.+t, you ain't never had too much you wanted to hold on to so hold the rocks if that what you want!” And she did.

Now, she asked Charles to take Maybelline back to the city to get the rest of Maybelline's things to move down there and Charles didn't mind at all cause I had seen him looking that Maybelline upways, downways, and both sideways and I could tell he liked what he saw and so could Maybelline cause she was always posing or prancing. Anyway, they went for a day, one night and back the next day. Before they went, I saw Charles sit on the side of Mary's bed and, first time I ever saw him do it, take her hand and hold it, then bend down and kiss her on the forehead. Musta been thinking bout what he was going to do to Maybelline while they was gone, but anyway, I'm glad he did do it. It brought tears to Mary's eyes. Then, they were gone and before they got back, Mary was gone.

I have to stop a minute cause everytime I think of that sweet woman . . .

She had told me what to do, the funeral and all, so I had taken care of some of those things and Mary was already gone to the funeral home and the funeral was the next day.

When they come home or back, whatever!, all they had to do was get ready to go to the parlor. I don't know when or nothing like that, but when Charles went to the closet to get something to wear, the closet was bare, except for a note: ”Dear Charles,” it say, ”They gone to the Salvation Army just like you always say you want. Yours truly, Mary.”

Now that man run all over trying to find some way to get them back but they was nice things and somebody had done bought them or either kept them, you know what I mean? Then, he rush over to the bank to get some money and found out his name wasn't on the account no more! The manager gave him a letter say: ”Dear Charles, You told me so many times you don't need me or nothing that is mine. Not going to force you to do nothing you don't want to do! Always, Mary.”

His named was replaced with Maybelline's so naturally he went to see her at the store. She say sure, and give him $50 and he say, ”Come go with me and help me pick it out,” and she say she ain't got time. So he told her take time. She say. ”I got to take care this business and close the store for the funeral.” He say, ”I'll close the store, this ain't your business to worry about.” She say, ”This my store.” He say, ”Are you crazy?” She say, ”I ain't crazy. I'm the boss!” He say, ”I'm Mary's husband, what's here is mine!” She say, ”That's true, but this store ain't hers, it's mine! I bought it from her!” He say, ”With what? You can't afford to buy no store as nice as this!” She say, ”Mary lent me the money; it's all legal; lawyer and everything!” He say, ”How you gon' pay her back? You got to pay me, b.i.t.c.h!” She say, ”No . . . no . . . when Mary died, all debt clear.” He say, ”I'll see about that!” She say, ”Here, here the lawyer's name and number.” He s.n.a.t.c.hed it and left. He musta found out she was right and it was legal cause I never heard no more about it.

Now everybody bringing food and all, the house was full, but I was among the last to go and when Charles got ready to go to bed he say he wasn't going to sleep in the room Mary died in and he went into the third bedroom. I heard him holler and went in there and the covers was pulled back and the bed was full of rocks . . . and a note say: ”Dear Charles, Tried to get what you wanted, couldn't carry no boulder, honest. Yours, Mary.” Me, I just left.

Next morning he opens the food cupboard and it was almost empty, but for a note and note say: ”Dear Charles, here is 30 days supply of food. Waste that too. Yours, Mary.” I'm telling you, his life was going upside down. He and Maybelline stayed in that house alone together and that old Charles musta had something going on that was alright cause pretty soon they were married. I knew he thought he was marrying that store again, but let me tell you, Maybelline was pretty and fleshy but she couldn't count and didn't like to pay bills or the workers on that little piece of land of Mary's and pretty soon she was broke and the store was closed cause nothing wasn't in there but some old brown dead lettuce and turned up carrots and empty soda bottles and tired squashy tomatoes didn't n.o.body want. Charles didn't have nothing but an almost empty house. They cussed and fought and she finally left saying she wasn't really his wife cause she didn't have no divorce from her last husbands! So there!

Now, that ought to be all but let me finish telling you this cause I got to go now and see bout my own life.

Exactly a year pa.s.sed from the day Mary had pa.s.sed and a white lady and a black lady came to Mary's house with some papers and I heard a lot of hollering and shouting after a bit and Charles was putting them out. They waved those papers and said they would be back . . . and they did, a week later, with the Sheriff. Seems like Mary had give Charles one year to live there in the house and then it was to go, all legally, to be a orphan home for black children.

Welllll, when everything was over, I saw him sitting outside in his car, kinda raggedy now, just sitting there looking at the house. I took a deep breath and went to my dresser and got out the envelope Mary had give me to give him one year from her death, at this time. I looked at it awhile thinking bout all that had happened and feeling kind of sorry for Charles till I remembered we hoe our own rows and what we plants there, we picks. So I went on out and handed him the envelope through the car window. He rolled me red eyes and a dirty look and opened the envelope and saw a one hundred dollar bill and . . . a note. He read it with a sad, sad look on his face. ”Dear Charles, here is $100. Take all the nothing you want and in a year you'll have everything. Yours truly, your dead wife, Mary.” Well, he just sat there a minute, staring at the money and the note, then started his car up and slowly drove away without so much as ”good-by.” Going somewhere to spend that money I guess, or just stop and stare off into s.p.a.ce . . . Whatever!

Are You Experienced?

BY DANZY SENNA.

Way back in 1969, there was this girl named Josephine, a Negro by race, but pale as b.u.t.ter, with straight black hair that fell to her waist. Everybody called her Jo.

She was married to a pretty boy named Charles, a failed musician, whom once upon a time she had loved something awful. Now she only needed him.

One cold week in December he decided Jo wasn't pretty enough, white enough, woman enough for him. He blew her week's earnings on the horses, and disappeared. Rumor had it that he had run off with a white chick named Barbara, which was certainly possible. White girls were always falling for him.

He left Jo without even a dollar for food or diapers for their three year old son, Diego.

She trembled with rage as she called the person she always called in moments like this: her best childhood friend, Carol Anne, who lived in the city.

”Girl,” Carol Anne sighed when she'd finished her story, ”You gone and married a bulls.h.i.+t artist. You need to leave his a.s.s. You need to get your behind to the city, today.”

”But what about the kid?” Jo said, sniffling, eyeing the boy where he sat banging blocks across the room.

”Leave him with Charlie's mother,” Carol Anne said, without pause. ”That's what grandma's are for. She'll spoil the child senseless and he won't notice anything's wrong. Give yourself a few days, Jo. I'll show you what you're missing. I'll show you a good time.”

So Jo, whispering curses under her breath at her missing husband, did as her friend had told her. She packed a bag of clothes and diapers for Diego and brought him to his Grandma Louise on the other side of town. The old woman did not ask questions. She knew her son was no good. Jo told her she'd be gone a few days. Would the kid be okay with her? The old woman was happy to take him in. And he seemed content to sit in front of her black-and-white television, shoving cookies in his mouth. He did not pull his eyes away from the cartoon to say goodbye.

Jo left for New York that afternoon without man or child and, when the bus pulled away from the depot, she felt her rage transform into a giddy, girlish excitement, something she had not felt in a long, long time. She glimpsed her face in the window beside her and remembered that she was not bad looking. She said to her own reflection, ”Two can play at this game.”

Jo's girlfriend, Carol Anne, lived the life she had not chosen. Carol Anne was happily unmarried, childless, and worked designing costumes for rock musicians and Broadway musicals. She was a caramel colored girl with a light brown afro and the long muscular legs of a track star. The two women had grown up together in the nation's capital. They'd spent their teenage years plotting their escape from what they called ”Boojie-dom.” They considered themselves sisters-fellow conspirators in their escape from that high yellow prison.

They were both considered good looking, in a similar hinkety way. Lucky for them they had never had the same taste in men. No cause for conflict.

Carol Anne had loved white boys from the beginning. In their arms she could be anybody, a mystery girl with no past and no discernable future. While brothers could see right through her, with white boys she could affect accents, don costumes, rewrite history for herself-and never be called out on her lies. With this one she was the daughter of a Brazilian sailor. With that one she was the half-caste child of an Indian aristocrat and a Nigerian princess. With white boys, her life could be theatre. They encouraged her antics. Brothers, on the other hand, were always trying to make her behave.

Jo stuck closer to home. She had never much liked white boys. They had always seemed to her an alien species-their bodies could stand out in the dark. She had always had a preference for brothers. Not the uptight, Boojie boys she had grown up with, but men two shades darker than she, revolutionaries, who could teach her a thing or two about the world, the streets.

And so it had seemed strange that in the end she'd married a brother who wasn't dark at all. The moody and mysterious Charles Moore was paler than a brown paper bag. But what he lacked in melanin, he made up for with att.i.tude. He was a jazz musician when she met him, with high ideas about how he was gonna conquer the world without ever trying. He was a first generation mulatto, the son of a brown-skinned housecleaner mother, and an anonymous white father. Jo had seen romance in his tragedy, splendor in his split roots.

Jo's family saw none of the allure. They had worked so hard to raise Jo up right, to send her to college, and at the end of the day, she had come home with this ragam.u.f.fin, bohemian, misfit b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Everything about him rubbed them wrong: the way he smoked those small brown cigarettes incessantly, cupped his mouth when he inhaled, the way he talked in a soft vague murmur about ”the trouble with whitey.” Jo's mother told her after dinner the night they met him: ”Josephine, you can't trust them mixed bloods. They have too much anger, too much conflict running through their blood. Find yourself a good colored boy.”

But Jo would hear none of it. She'd had enough of those over-bred puppy dogs her mother trotted out for her inspection-nice boys who were dry as toast at the end of the day.

When she'd told her mother she was marrying Charles, and dropping out of college to become a jazz singer, her mother seemed tired of fighting. She'd simply wrung her hands, looked heavenward, and said with a miserable smile: ”Well at least he's got good hair. At least you'll make pretty babies.”

In the early days of their union, Charles and Jo had been a team making music around the outskirts of the capital, and later in Boston at a small crowded jazz club on Tremont Street. But from the beginning it was clear: Jo's voice was better than Charles's playing. It wasn't that Charlie didn't have talent. He did, but it was talent without discipline. And he didn't s.h.i.+ne the way Jo did on stage. The moment she took the stage, a hush would fall over the audience and her voice, smoky and androgynous, would fill the s.p.a.ce with a remote yearning that could never be filled. Listening to her sing made one long for something indecipherable. Charles's horn, behind her, was just a background tune for her voice, nothing in itself. After a set, the boys and the girls would flock to the stage to compliment her. Charles would sit at the sidelines, rubbing a dirty cloth against his horn, glowering at his wife.

At first Jo had wanted to believe Charlies's failure was due to the alcohol or some inner torment that prevented him from being his best. She wanted to believe the reasons for his failure were complicated, traced back to his absent father and poverty-stricken youth.

But then one day, after a particularly bad show, it struck her: Charles was lazy. That was why he would never be great. He fancied himself a genius, and maybe he was, but he would never be more than mediocre. She had seen it so clearly she stopped breathing for a moment. Some people, she'd realized with a flash of lucidity, fall with a crash. Others, like Charlie, fall slowly, gently and slowly as a feather to their demise, so gradually they barely notice it happening. One day, they wake up, and they've hit the bottom. She thought, staring at her husband across the smoky nightclub air, that she would rather crash and burn any day of the week. There was nothing more horrifying to her than mediocrity. Nothing worse than a slow demise.

But she was loyal. She stuck by his side. Even when she had to stop singing, start working as a music teacher at a local public school to support them both and Charles had gotten a job as a cab driver (he said he wanted to feel he was moving somewhere, though he never got out of the car). Most nights, though, she came home to find him lying on the couch with a bottle of triple sec in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Sometimes, when he was sober and they would take the cab out and drive to the country, pretend they were really going on a trip. They would blast music, pa.s.s a joint between them, and giggle about the people they'd known in their club days, the wild things they'd seen.

But most of the time it wasn't like that. Most of the time they were fighting.

It didn't turn violent until after Diego was born.

The first time it happened she thought he'd lost control of his hand. She thought it had convulsed and ended up flying across her face. Holding her cheek she had stared at him silently as he turned away and shuffled back to the living room, muttering, ”s.h.i.+t,” under his breath. The second time it happened was outside a club, where he'd just given his lousiest and last performance. Like before he'd back-handed her, but this time when she fell he gave her a swift kick in the belly for good measure.

It was evening when Jo arrived at Carol Anne's crumbling studio in the Bowery. Carol Anne gave her a big perfumey hug and told Jo to forget about the Failed Musician, to lighten up and smoke a joint. ”Girl, we're goin out tonight. A party. New York style baby. I'm gonna show you how the other half live.”

She did Jo's makeup, dressed her up in a rainbow mini dress that showed off her slight figure, and braided her hair so she looked like a Navajo princess. Jo missed her baby boy with a pain that gnawed at her stomach, but she did as Carol Anne told her, and tried to feel her freedom.

The two women shared a joint and reminisced about their girlhood in D.C.-the clothes pins on their noses, the plaits in their hair-how far they'd wandered from all that. Linking arms, they'd leaned in towards one another against the icy wind, as they went out to meet the night.

As soon as they arrived at the party, in a tall doorman building overlooking Central Park, Jo felt out of place. The people there were in another league-dazzling and decadent, famous or at least pretending to be. She felt small and brown and dingy. As she stared at a blonde woman spinning circles in a sequined mini dress, she thought that she belonged at home, with her Failed Musician, and her little boy, Diego, who smelled of strawberry's behind his ears. But when she looked for Carol Anne, she was gone, swallowed up in the throngs, so Jo stood in a corner and anxiously sipped her champagne.

Later, somewhat tipsy, Jo wandered down the hall in search of a bathroom. Peeking in a door she saw a gaggle of white people surrounding one black man who sat like a king on a throne, his head tilted back and an expression that teetered between amus.e.m.e.nt and boredom. Jimi Hendrix. She recognized him immediately. She had listened to ”Foxy Lady” fourteen times in a row one night. She had wanted to go to Woodstock, but the Failed Musician had said he didn't want to hang around with a bunch of filthy, greasy haired honkies who smelled like wet dogs.

The people who surrounded him looked like industry types, sycophants and handlers. They were talking to him excitedly, but he looked bored, smoking at tiny stub of his joint and tapping his foot impatiently. His heavy eyes caught hers at the door. He smiled, a strange, familiar smile, as if he had known her already, for years. The gaggle of white folks turned around and smiled at her as well, waved her toward them, as if they were offering her up to this sullen prince. She stepped inside the room and stood before him speechless. Everyone else was silent too, as if they were waiting for his verdict. His eyes roved up and down her slim yellow body, until, finally, he winked and said, ”Hey sister. You lost?”

They slept together three times. Once that night, in the king sized water bed of the stranger who owned the apartment, and twice the next night, in his hotel suite at the Ritz. He said she reminded him of a world he had nearly forgotten. He traced his finger over her wide brown nipples and said she was a lovely little slip of a thing. She told him she was married to a Failed Musician who drank too much and sometimes slapped her upside her head. Naked beside him in the big slos.h.i.+ng bed, she showed him pictures of her little boy, Diego, and he admired the child, and said, giggling, he looked like a wet back. Before falling to sleep each night, she sang to Jimi with that smoky boy's voice of hers, and he told her, sleepily, that she had a voice that could make a grown man cry. On the third night, he asked her to come with him on the road. He told her he could make her a star. She only laughed, sadly, and told him it was too late for all that. She had a boy to go back to.